The one Christian thinks his Christianity was fully settled from the get-go, and that all he has to do to please God from here on out is simply to be.
The second thinks that what happened from the get-go was just a starting pistol, and that to please God is to become like Jesus.
The third can’t quite accept the aloofness of the be idea, but neither can he wholeheartedly embrace the full accountability of the become idea. He will never settle into either camp, and has no other choice but to be confused between the two.
The third group will always be conflicted over whether it is a good or a bad thing to ask Christians to do more, to learn more, and to mature more. They will always be torn over whether it is a good or a bad thing to demand that a Christian discontinue his egregious sins. They won’t even be sure whether it’s OK to call it out as sin, or whether this would somehow be going too far―”over the top”, as they say.
The third is the sort of camp in which most Christians settle down―some closer to the Be camp, and some closer to the Become camp, but all there in the middle somewhere. And it seems to me that their real problem with the Become camp is that eventuality in which a person does not become like Jesus adequately―does not mature sufficiently in his thoughts and attitudes and his deeds and habits―then he will not please God, and will be eternally rejected by him as a result. This seems to be the sticking point, best I can tell.
Interestingly, there are plenty of passages in the Bible that paint God and Jesus as judges of how we have done here in this life, so it’s not like there’s insufficient support for the idea. Rather, it seems that it’s simply a reality they’d rather not accept. So they sit in the middle, in one of those million-or-more camps between Camp Be and Camp Become, making some effort to become, but still pretending alternately that simply to be must somehow be ultimately sufficient in God’s eyes. They’re simply not submissive to the reality as it is, and wish it were something else. So they’ll not throw all-in. And this is Christianity for many many millions of people. They will never discover much at all about what God intended them to become, and they’ll be terribly disappointed with the passive life of be.
